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I’m heading to Austin, Texas, this weekend for my third consecutive SXSW. It’s a huge few days, and while tiring, an event I always look forward to for a chance to connect with many friends and build new relationships.

If you’ll be there please leave a comment or tweet me; if you’re reading this I’d love to see you.

Without further ado, here are the three main conversations I’ll be having in Texas:

1. What are you up to that’s cool?

You’ll never find as many smart digital people in one place as these few days in Austin. I’m looking forward to learning new things and getting inspired by other peoples work.

Big new ideas often pop at SXSW: Twitter got a huge boost there early on, Foursquare launched there, and this year I’m tipping Highlight will get people chatting – it’s the most interesting app I’ve found for some time.

In particular, I’m personally hiring two roles and it’s likely the right people for them will be at SXSW:

Director of Corporate Partnerships: an authentic, strategic, digitally-savvy biz dev person who can raise $5 million from corporates this year while building a plan to do $30 million in 2015.

Marketing Analyst: a data person who will be responsible for building a personal automated email program for us and will work on defining and measuring our marketing efforts.

3. Can you or your brand help charity: water this year?

We’re aiming to raise $25 million this year, 100% will directly fund clean water projects. We’ve got a bunch of exciting campaigns launching throughout the year and many ways individuals or brands can get involved. I’ll be looking to recruit more great partners to help them make our story their story and bring the water crisis to more people.

In particular, I’ll be trying to marshall support for a huge online campaign we’re launching for World Water Day on March 22. If you’re interested in learning more about it – ping me!

Hey Paul,
Did you happen to meet the FaithVillage.com guys, Brad and Blake, at SXSW? They were filming the mobile.faith presentation on 3/8. We’d love to see how charity:water and FaithVillage can partner together. We combine community (social networking) with great content, in part to help believers connect with causes they care about. Hope you can take a look.